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The oldest conundrum in fantasy role-playing games is what to do about a player-character that’s just bit the dust. Is resurrection quick and easy, making death more of a speed bump than a major event? Or is death final and irrevocable, leading to a player who then has to spend the rest of the session sitting out (often while rolling up a new character)? There’s no good answer to these questions, and for decades different DMs, groups, and games have gone back and forth between the two extremes. Rite Publishing, however, says that you can have your cake and eat it too with their Restless Soul supplement for the Pathfinder RPG – a supplement that lets you keep playing your character after they die.
Notwithstanding the covers, Restless Souls is a book that’s entirely in black and white, with many shades of grey in between; very apropos for a book of this nature. The product page notes it as being seventeen pages, which is the length of the PDF file, but also lists thirteen – this is th ... [read full review]
Rating:  [4 of 5 Stars!] |
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It’s a good thing that H. P. Lovecraft is already dead (notwithstanding the strange aeons), because if he ever saw Cthentacle, and how it quite literally perverted his Mythos, he would have been driven stark raving mad, probably unto suicide, in a manner not unlike most of his literary protagonists. Of course, being the sort of guy he was, I imagine that’s how Howard would have wanted to go.
The above was my first thought upon looking over the Cthentacle card game, from Postmortem Studios.
Cthentacle is the sort of card game you play when nudie decks alone aren’t enough. No, in this game, each player has a female character, and the object of the game is to have the Great Old Ones violate the other characters until they’re incapacitated. The last girl standing (or rather, still dressed and with some scrap of dignity) wins. Needless to say I really wish I’d had this card game during my best friend’s bachelor party a while back.
The manner of play is fairly simple and very easy ... [read full review]
Rating:  [5 of 5 Stars!] |
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We hold this truth to be self-evident: that giant robots are cool, and they’re never more cool than when they’re being piloted to save mankind by destroying a hideous giant monster. I really don’t know why American cinema hasn’t picked up on that yet – seriously, Cloverfield would have been a much better movie if the guys with the camera had been rushing to find a Megazord to pilot so they could stomp all over the thing. Luckily, Vigilance Press has given us everything we need to recreate that scenario the way it should have happened with their new supplement for Modern and/or Future d20 gaming, Mecha Omega.
Mecha Omega is a surprisingly brief book, being only twenty-two pages long including things like the cover and OGL declaration. Despite that, there are no bookmarks to be found here, which makes me boo the book, albeit just a little bit. The pages are all white, with orange borders along the top and bottom of each page. There’s a decent amount of art within the book, virtually a ... [read full review]
Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!] |
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One of my favorite ways to begin an adventure is in medias res (Latin for “into mid-affairs”). It’s a nice contrast to start things out when the action is beginning, letting the PCs begin in the at the entrance to the proverbial dungeon rather than have to wade through the sometimes-tedious matter of how they all get together and go adventuring in the first place. One of the best ways to accomplish this is to have a crisis come to them and force them together, which is what Encounters: Year of the Zombie: Dead Stock accomplishes.
Set about two days into the Rising (the inexplicable worldwide uprising of zombies), Dead Stock nominally takes place in the small town of San Jose, but really works anywhere. The nice thing about Year of the Zombie is that the omnipresent threat of the undead (to say nothing of the human threat in a post-apocalyptic world) make a lot of these adventures largely self-driven – when survival itself is near-constantly in jeopardy, the PCs are almost always adv ... [read full review]
Rating: [4 of 5 Stars!] |
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Remember that old RPG trope where, after the adventure, the player says “I think I’ll just blow my share of the treasure on ale and whores”? Ah, those were the days – not so much for the sentiment itself, but for the in-game attitude taken by the player at the time. I’ve yet to play in a game where the PCs didn’t spend their loot on better weapons, armor, or magic items – things that give a mechanical advantage for their dice rolls, rather than the in-game pleasures of booze or babes. However, The Intimate Shape Festhall, the latest Evocative City Sites, from Rite Publishing, offers something to those PCs who do enjoy paying for a lady of the evening.
This product comes with three PDFs. The two supplementary PDFs are enlarged maps, each of one of the Festhall’s two floors. The maps are black and white, and broken up across the multiple pages since they’re in a size large enough for print-and-play. Literally lay the sheets side-by-side after they come out of the printer and you have ... [read full review]
Rating:  [3 of 5 Stars!] |
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I think it was the “Yahooey” that got me.
Being the sort of person who had already been drawn to review several Hot Chicks books already, I knew exactly what “yiffy” and “yaoi” were. But that last one was ill-defined enough that I couldn’t help but check the book out, if for no other reason than to satisfy my curiosity. Looking the book over, I not only found not only what the book meant with that last part of its title, but something else as well: a truly excellent, well thought-out supplement that adds a new dimension to the Hot Chicks RPG game. Talk about good furtune!
Before anything else, though, let’s go over the technical aspects. One thing that needs to be made clear is that this book has nudity. A LOT of nudity. Almost all of it is, of course, of furry characters (rarely there’s a human; more often the exceptions are the smileys, the new villains introduced here), and quite often it’s full-frontal, of both male and female characters. Moreover, because the tactics of the ... [read full review]
Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!] |
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All too often, religion is relegated to being the province of divine spellcasting characters only, with everyone else usually not even bothering to scribble down the name of a patron deity on their character sheet. Naturally, this eschews quite a few avenues for truly role-playing the character, as one needn’t be a cleric (or ranger, druid, or what-have-you) to be religious. It’s this point that Jon Brazer Enterprises’ Pathfinder supplement, Book of the Faithful: Power of Prayer, focuses on.
A short book, Power of Prayer is only seven pages long, including the cover and credits/legal page. Despite that, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the product had extensive bookmarks to every heading, with some even being nested – nice bit of extra service there in such a brief PDF. The book also has more artwork than I would have thought; besides the full color cover, there are two interior black and white illustrations, and each page has a large (perhaps slightly too large) border o ... [read full review]
Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!] |
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There’s an old axiom which says something to the effect of “it’s not who you are that matters, but what you do.” This, I think, nicely sums up the Pathfinder philosophy regarding how important race is compared to class; that is to say, it’s not. After all, the higher your class levels, the less important your race becomes; moreover, this distinction has a damning tendency to bleed over from mechanics to play-style, and it’s not hard to understand why. The core Pathfinder races feel, shall we say, “excessively familiar,” to the point where they seem almost interchangeable – when’s the last time you really role-played the differences between a gnome and a halfling? They just seem the same.
And then Alluria Publishing released Remarkable Races Pathway to Adventure: Compendium of Unusual PC Races, which solved that problem neatly.
Remarkable Races is, as the lengthy title spells out, a book of exotic races suitable for players to use in their Pathfinder game. There are a grand total ... [read full review]
Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!] |
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Divine characters have more baggage attached to them than any other characters. This is because a tie to a religion automatically connects them to a larger aspect of the campaign world, as their faith must be explained so that we know what it is the character worships. Ironically, this level of effort isn’t reflected among most divine characters in terms of their mechanics, with only domains really making a difference among clerics, and even less than that for most other divine spellcasters. 4 Winds Fantasy Gaming attempts to spice things up with their Pathfinder supplement, The Book of Divine Magic.
The first thing I noticed about this book was the size of it; I don’t mean in terms of pages, but rather the actual number of megabytes it took to download – a whopping ninety-three, almost one megabyte per page! The Pathfinder Core Rulebook PDF has more than six times as many pages as this book, and far more illustrations, and was still a smaller file than this. I don’t know how 4 Wind ... [read full review]
Rating: [4 of 5 Stars!] |
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Making a new base class is probably one of the hardest things to design for in the Pathfinder RPG. This is because, more than any other part of the game, a class is the largest part of a PC, and any flaws with it can quickly come to cripple that character (or alternately be so unbalanced that the character overshadows the other PCs) and impact on the player’s enjoyment of the game – it’s hard to have fun when your character is worthless, or making everyone else feel that way about their characters. Making a new class is, quite literally, a delicate balancing act.
It was thus with a sense of trepidation that I looked at Adventuring Classes: A Fistful of Denarii, from Tripod Machine. Having already seen several third-parties come up with new base classes, some of which were great, others not so much, I can admit now that I’d somehow lapsed into the stereotypical (and very unfair) mindset of “the smaller a company is, the more likely they’ll turn out untested drivel.” Given that this w ... [read full review]
Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!] |
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Trying to fit a mythical idea into a role-playing game can be a difficult balancing act. The structured, balanced nature of an RPG is sometimes a bad fit for the vague and often poorly-defined nature of many old myths and legends, meaning that unless the author does some very creative designing, the end result can feel incomplete. That’s the impression I got from The Harrowed, by OtherWorld Creations.
The product is a very short one, being only three pages long (with the third page being the OGL). The majority of the first page is the cover image, which is reproduced in a smaller, black and white format on the second page, along with thin borders along the top and bottom.
The Harrowed consists of exactly two things (after the one-paragraph introduction): a spell, and the resulting template. Specifically, the spell, called Harrow, removes the target’s soul without killing them, and the Harrowed template is then applied to them. There’s nothing else here, which is perhaps why the p ... [read full review]
Rating: [3 of 5 Stars!] |
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There are some images that are the epitome of the genre they come from, whether it’s a psychic monk with a glowing energy sword for space opera or a leather-clad rebel fleeing from police on hover-bikes through the filthy alleys of a dystopia for cyberpunk. For fantasy, though, the iconic image is that of a sword-wielding hero riding on the back of a dragon. Despite its iconic stature, however, it’s not something that’s easy to pull off in your average Pathfinder game simply because of the problem with finding a dragon that your character can ride on…until OtherWorld Creations published The Genius Guide to the Dragonrider.
For a technical perspective, this PDF does relatively well. There are no bookmarks, something I prefer in PDFs, but since there are only thirteen pages here, I can’t really take off points for that. There are brief borders along the top and bottom of each page, and several full color pictures, so printing this out shouldn’t be too much trouble for anyone who wants ... [read full review]
Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!] |
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I missed the boat on the First Edition of the world’s most popular fantasy role-playing game, having gotten into it a few years into Second Edition. As such, I never quite got what the thief-acrobat was all about, save for a vague idea that it was a more acrobatic version of the normal thief. Now I play Pathfinder, where the thief is called the rogue, Acrobatics is a skill, and LPJ Design has just released Lost Classes of Fantasy: Thief Acrobat in what I assume is a thematic (rather than literal) update for the old 1E class. So, let’s look under the hood.
The PDF is nine pages long, counting six for the class itself, one for the OGL, and two for a character sheet that’s included also. Save for the graphic on the first page, there’s no art here (notwithstanding the company logo on the character sheet), though there are grey borders along the top and bottom of each page; hence, printing this won’t be a problem. I’m always a fan of bookmarks, and initially was pleasantly surprised to s ... [read full review]
Rating: [3 of 5 Stars!] |
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Ecology articles are a classic staple of the world’s most popular fantasy role-playing game. Of those, I think that perhaps the best ones are those that explain not just the life-cycles and thought processes of their featured creature, but go one step further in tying a creature in with another in an unexpected way. For example, I once read an ecology about the phantom fungus (a rather silly creature by itself) that made it a part of the fungal order controlled by none other than the mi-go. That knocked my socks off. It’s that same kind of re-examining that Darkness Without Form: Secrets of the Mimic attempts to evoke.
A short PDF at twenty-four pages, Darkness Without Form is quite artistic. Having not only full bookmarks, each page has a fairly elaborate pair of borders along the top and bottom, looking like swirling masses of protoplasm. Several interior illustrations, both in color and black and white, also adorn the book. I want to take a moment to call out a great kudos on the ... [read full review]
Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!] |
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Fairy tales are one of the building blocks of modern culture, in that they’re among the first stories we learn as children, and which usually have a lesson in them that helps to shape us into who we are. Also like building blocks, they quickly become so commonplace that they’re entirely overlooked by everyone – can you remember the last time you sat down and read (or had read to you), or even just thought about, the tale of Hansel and Gretel? Now imagine that you suddenly, while taking a shortcut through a wooded area, found yourself in front of a gingerbread house. That’s the sort of scenario that Once Upon A Time: A Guide to Fairy Tales brings to your Modern d20 game.
A forty-two page book, the PDF of Once Upon A Time is formatted nicely, containing nested bookmarks and having copy and pasting enabled. The book is fairly spartan in terms of decoration, having only a few color illustrations scattered throughout its pages. Beyond those, there are no interior decorations, meaning tha ... [read full review]
Rating: [4 of 5 Stars!] |
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![[PFRPG] The Book of Divine Magic](images/2680/64477-thumb100.jpg "[PFRPG] The Book of Divine Magic")
![[PFRPG] The Harrowed](images/97/65782-thumb100.jpg "[PFRPG] The Harrowed")
![[PFRPG] The Genius Guide to the Dragonrider](images/97/65893-thumb100.jpg "[PFRPG] The Genius Guide to the Dragonrider")
